Casa

The Lyonsgate Casa dei Bambini (“Children’s House”) programme is for potty-trained students between the ages of 2.5–6-years-old. It is a sensory-rich environment of discovery designed to promote a love of learning and deep concentration. It is an individualized, bilingual programme that helps each child develop physically, emotionally, cognitively, and socially, at their own pace. The Montessori curriculum helps each child gain self-confidence, independence, physical development, and the tools necessary for academic progression. The multi-age group provides opportunities for peer learning and mentorship, both in the classroom and on the playground. The Montessori Casa environment consists of four areas: Practical Life, Sensorial, Language, and Mathematics, and contains elements of the Culture curriculum within the four core subjects. Children are given a careful balance between direction, guidance, and freedom in all areas.

Practical Life

In the Practical Life area of the Montessori Casa environment, children learn how to function successfully in their own environment. The practical life area has activities that surround the child with everyday life activities, such as pouring, cutting, and sweeping. As children at this age continue to adapt to activities of the home and family environment these exercises draw them in to an understanding of how things work. Through care of the environment, care of the person, and grace and courtesy, the practical life area is the foundation for all the other areas of the classroom. These exercises aid the child in developing control and co-ordination of their movements, concentration, independence, self-esteem, and responsibility.

Practical life activities include:

  • Exercises involving proper use of mat, chair, door, tray, grain, water, funnel, sponge, and folding.
  • Care of self, including washing hands, grooming, sewing, and dressing frames (learning to zip, button, and snap), as well as personal hygiene activities such as handwashing and blowing noses.
  • Care of the indoor environment, including dusting, sweeping, polishing, furniture washing, mopping, folding, and flower arranging.
  • Food preparation, including setting a table, preparing fruit and vegetables, and pouring.
  • Care of the outdoor environment, including sweeping, shoveling, pulling weeds, and collecting leaves.
  • Grace and courtesy skills, including greetings, shaking hands, excusing oneself, not interrupting, introductions, and saying please and thank you.

Sensorial

Montessori developed materials for the Sensorial area that represent abstractions such as length, volume, and colour. The Sensorial materials allow the child to work with abstract ideas using concrete activities. Through these activities, the child also learns corresponding language and has the freedom to manipulate and learn from their own work.

The early years are the critical years for the development of the senses. The main objective of the Sensorial area is to refine and develop the five senses. Classification, contrasting and comparison of colour, shape, smell, feel, temperature, weight, and texture are all explored. All of this broadens the child’s ability to proceed to a higher level of activity.

Specific sensorial activities include:

  • Language and games involving Cylinder Blocks, Pink Tower, Broad Stair, Red Rods, Colour Tablets, and Geometric Solids.
  • Exercises involving the Geometric Cabinet (circles, rectangles, irregular figures, triangles, and polygons), Constructive Triangles, Binomial Cube, Trinomial Cube, Knob-less Cylinders (graduation and comparison), stereognostic senses (rough and smooth boards and fabrics), and discrimination exercises (Mystery Bag, Smelling Bottles).

Language

The Language area focuses on the enrichment of spoken language, as well as the development of writing and reading. Children are presented with a broad and varied vocabulary applied to all areas of the curriculum, and are encouraged to develop their conversational skills in both English and French. The French-speaking assistant provides an immersive experience, material-based vocabulary lessons, and uses music and song to encourage second language acquisition.

Children are given the keys to express themselves in writing through classic Montessori materials such as the Sandpaper Letters and Moveable Alphabet before they progress to reading.

Specific language activities include:

  • Enrichment of vocabulary and concepts through questioning games, conversation, naming materials, story-telling, classified cards, and poetry.
  • Sandpaper Letters and Moveable Alphabet.
  • Phonetic Object Game and Reading Cards.
  • Key phonograms used in making words, sentences, and stories.

Mathematics

The primary purpose of the Montessori mathematics materials at the Casa level is to lay a sound quantity and numeral foundation. Children are intuitively interested in numbers, quantities, and the decimal system. Manipulative materials are utilised in the mathematics curriculum to provide independent, hands-on experience with mathematical principles. These materials assist the children in developing number sense and awareness of quantity in relation to numeric symbols, as well as a deep understanding of the decimal system and place value. Work is also undertaken to solve equations in all four operations, as well the memorization of addition/subtraction and multiplication/division tables. Children are also introduced to work with fractions.

Specific mathematics activities include the following:

  • Numbers one to ten.
  • Decimal system (units, tens, hundreds, thousands).
  • Teens and tens.
  • Short and Long Bead Chains.
  • Memory work on addition, subtraction, division and multiplication.
  • Sensorial introduction to fractions.

Culture

Elements of the Culture curriculum are found within each of the four core subject areas, introducing young students to customs, visual art, and music from around the world. The Montessori Bells are a foundation material for the children’s study of music to develop their ear and an understanding of intervals of sound through the C Major scale. Other culture materials develop the children’s interest in physical and social geography, and provide an introduction to the study of botany and zoology. Activities in the culture area often complement activities in other areas, such as the Practical Life and Sensorial areas.

In terms of science, Casa children learn about living and non-living things, plants and their parts, animals and their parts, life cycles, metamorphosis, and the physical sciences. Seasons and temperature are also part of science work.

Specific science activities include:

  • Living things, including plants, animals, and introductions to their classification, such as vertebrates and invertebrates.
  • Non-living things, including natural and human-made distinctions.
  • Botany cards, language, and extensions of the involved materials.
  • Zoology, including vertebrates, general characteristics of birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates.

Social studies work consists of geography, history, calendar, time, holidays, maps, and world cultures.

Specific areas of focus include:

  • Geology.
  • Geographic knowledge-building materials, including a sandpaper globe, painted globe, map of the world (continents and oceans), maps of the continents, needs of humanity, land and water forms (island/lake, cape/bay, gulf/peninsula, isthmus/strait, systems of lakes/archipelago); many of these materials also reinforce motor-skills development.
  • Word study definitions that complement language area work.

Children are also introduced to various forms of art, and they work to develop the skills required to create their own artistic expressions; many of these skills complement the fine-motor work they perform in other areas of the classroom in preparation for future writing work.

Specific art activities include:

  • Developmental skills including cutting, use of brushes, using glue, drawing, colouring, and metal insets (no, sadly, not metal insects).
  • Exposure to works of art.

Music in the Casa environment includes the development of skills, appreciation for music, and the development of auditory discrimination and fine-motor skills.

Specific music activities include:

  • Bell exercises to help develop perceptions of high vs. low sounds, matching, and scale.
  • Singing, and exposure to different types of music.